I will describe a conceptual framework that my colleagues and I have recently developed for studying collective adaptation: the process of iterative co-adaptation of cognitive strategies, social environments, and problem structures. Going beyond searching for “intelligent” collectives, we integrated research from different disciplines to show how collective adaptation perspective can help explain why similar collectives can follow very different and sometimes counter-intuitive trajectories. In this talk, I will discuss how this perspective helps to explain why successful collectives appear to have a general collective intelligence factor, why collectives rarely optimize their behavior for a single problem, why their behaviors can appear myopic, and why playful exploration of alternative social systems can be useful. I will describe different approaches for the study of collective adaptation, including computational models inspired by evolution and statistical physics. The framework of collective adaptation enables the integration and formalization of knowledge about human collective phenomena and opens doors to a more rigorous, transdisciplinary pursuit of important outstanding questions about human sociality.

 

Working paper: https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/5f2ad